Friday’s March for Life involved hundreds of thousands of people from across the country. It was a march led by women. It is also remarkably diverse, with advocates and allies ranging from Rhode Island Catholics to Texas Methodists to California atheists and Orthodox Jews from Connecticut.
African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Caucasians, and others took to the streets of D.C. to rage against injustice and stand for hope and a brighter tomorrow. Both Democrats and Republicans were represented at the march, locking arms in rare agreement. Straight, gay, bisexual, gender nonconforming, and most other stripes one can name in the rainbow of humanity were also represented there, a paragon of intersectionality.
You might think I’m confusing it with the recent Women’s March. But the March for Life is actually the most intersectional large-scale protest regularly held in the U.S.
The tired caricature of the pro-life movement as exclusively religious, led by men, and heterosexually normative is more out of date than the 2007 Blackberry Curve. All you have to do is to look at the leadership of the cause for life. It couldn’t be any clearer that the energy is young and diverse.
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, oversees the entire March. It’s no small feat to organize up to a million participants every year. Terrisa Bukovinac, founder and executive director of Pro-Life San Francisco, is a committed atheist and one of the fiercest fighters for human rights I know. Rehumanize International’s director of Outreach, Herb Geraghty, is a strong advocate and example of life-affirming advocacy in the gay, lesbian, and transgender community. His presence is a reminder that everyone is welcome in the community that seeks to ensure that all people have the chance to be born and find their community.
Neither political conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on human rights. The issue of abortion is so fundamental a question that it makes perfect sense why the spectrum of life-affirming views cannot be accurately represented by any one political party or ideology.
The wide-ranging demographics and views in the pro-life movement transcend the stale right-left binary, just as all civil rights issues have throughout our national history. The fight to abolish slavery, to give women the vote, to give full rights to African Americans, each of these issues swept through the divisions of their day to make strange allies and interesting majorities.
Pro-life Americans have discovered what too many in other movements seem to have forgotten, that diversity, both of thought and of social demographics, is a strength, not a weakness.
As a woman who is pro-life, post-abortive, and a committed feminist, I know firsthand that outdated notions of what a pro-life leader looks like deserve to be excised from respected commentary. The welcoming nature of the movement itself, and the diversity present at the March for Life, may shock some, but for those who have been following the issue, it seems perfectly natural. Although the March for Life is the largest annual gathering of pro-life people, it is only a showcase of the passion and the hard work that activists put into the world every day.
At any moment, in one of our nation’s almost 3,000 pregnancy care centers, empathetic volunteers are working with pregnant and often frightened women to help meet their basic needs and ensure a healthy outcome for them and their children, before and after they are born. What many often forget is the clientele that these centers are primarily serving. The idea underpinning the entire concept of intersectionality is the often interdependent systems of disadvantage to which many are subjected. Pro-life pregnancy centers serve women squarely in the middle of these subtle oppressions and women who are often struggling economically, without a partner, or from a minority background.
It’s no wonder that the movement that spends its time helping women of all types and backgrounds to prepare for their child’s birth is also extremely welcoming of every type of person you can imagine at our annual gathering to fight for basic human rights for the least among us.
Catherine Glenn Foster serves as president & CEO of Americans United for Life.
